50% off? It's storage sale madness!

Hey virtual server storage buyers: save 50 per cent of the storage you would have bought or we'll make up the difference! NetApp has extended its 50 per cent storage savings guarantee from VMware to Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

Customers who fail to save 50 per cent of the storage they would have bought will get the difference made up by NetApp at no charge.

There are two provisos. The savings are compared to a baseline storage provisioning scheme, and the customers must use NetApp best practices. The baseline scheme is calculated this way; suppose 10TB raw storage is needed. It is doubled to 20TB to provide RAID 10 protection (RAID 10 protection offers drive mirroring for protection [RAID 1] and striping [RAID 0] for performance), 2.6 per cent extra is added for formatting and right-sizing, and two spare drives are added to cope with disk failures, bringing the total storage baseline requirement to about 21.75TB.

The customer will only need to purchase half of this, 10.875TB, but must buy NetApp FAS or V-Series arrays with NetApp drives, have at least 14 physical drives, and enable AutoSupport, thin provisioning, de-duplication and NetApp Snapshot, as well as follow documented best practices for whichever virtual server environment applies.

NetApp kindly points out that no other large storage vendor - EMC, HDS, HP, or IBM for example - offers such a guarantee.

However, Pillar Data, which supplies its Axiom storage product, offers an 80 per cent capacity utilisation guarantee - with Pillar's CEO, Mike Workman, offering salty comments about the NetApp guarantee on his blog.

EMC's Chuck Hollis, VP and global marketing chief technology officer, also expressed an opinion about the original NetApp guarantee here.

Hollis goes on at length, but the key quote is, "I feel like I'm watching one of those local TV ads watching Crazy Eddy peddling used cars on Sunday morning."®